American Physics and the Cold War Bubble presents
a cultural history of life and thought in American Cold War universities.
The book traces relationships between enrollments and epistemology, between
infrastructure and the world of ideas. Elucidating these links, and
how they have evolved in the recent past, may hold clues for the future of
teaching and research in the post-Cold-War world.

At the heart of the book is a massive experiment in social engineering that
unfolded in the United States during the decades after World War II, in what
might be called the credentialing of America. Higher education was
booming, thanks to programs like the G. I. Bill. Graduate-level enrollments
in English and history departments skyrocketed, doubling every three years,
as they did in economics and sociology departments as well. Amid the
runaway growth, however, one field led the pack: graduate enrollments
in physics grew nearly twice as quickly as all other fields combined.
Yet the fantastic growth proved unsustainable. By the early 1970s --
years into the slog of Vietnam, combined with détente, economic recession,
and massive cuts in defense and education spending -- enrollments across the
board entered a steep decline. Once again physics served as a bellwether,
its enrollments plummeting faster and deeper than any other field.
Rising fastest and dropping hardest, physics set the trend both in good times
and bad for larger transitions in American higher education. The physicists'
enrollment curve, so eerily symmetrical in its rise and fall, serves as the
leitmotif for the book. (See fig. 1.)

Fig.
1. Number of physics Ph.D.s granted by U.S. institutions per year,
1945-1980. Also shown are the total number of U.S. Ph.D.s granted
in all fields per year, normalized to the number of physics degrees in 1945
(to show relative rates of growth); and the portion of the U.S. population
between the ages of 25 and 29. To convert the normalized Ph.D.s to
total Ph.D.s, multiply by 38.0. Based on data from the National Research
Council, Century of Doctorates (1978); National Science Foundation,
Science and Engineering Degrees, 1966-2001 (2004); and
United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects (2004).

The sudden swings in student ranks triggered all manner
of transformations in American academic life; their effects were felt in
the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences alike. Yet they
were often felt first and at their most extreme by the nation’s physicists.
The frenzied periods of growth spawned rampant bureaucracy, fears of specialization
and its challenges to intellectual and social cohesion, even generational
conflicts over the mores and motivations behind scholarly work. They
also helped determine what would be taught: auditorium-sized classrooms
called for different pedagogical approaches than intimate seminars.
When enrollments faltered a quarter century later, academics in all fields
faced a new round of questions about the relevance of their work and the
goals of higher education.

Throughout this period, university leaders across the country often treated
physicists as synecdoche for the university as a whole, taking lessons from
the physicists' example for how scholars should handle large class sizes,
fund their research, communicate their findings, and share their expertise
with various patrons. They quickly received help from physicists themselves:
by the late 1950s, more deans came from the physical sciences than from any
other specialty. For better and worse, the physicists' model -- itself
forged under extreme pressures of student numbers -- spread to most departments
on the nation’s campuses. It is still the model we inhabit today.

Chapter Outlinefor American Physics and the Cold War Bubble

Chapter 1, The Standing Army of Big Science. Politics
and pedagogy became intertwined in the atomic age, as politicians and pundits
declared that the nation's "most precious resource" in the Cold War struggle
was its "stockpile" of physics graduate students. Policy began to reflect
rhetoric, from the rewriting of draft deferment policies to the bankrolling
of huge numbers of new federal fellowships. Reports (of dubious quality)
that the Soviets were training twice as many physicists and engineers as
the United States only fanned the flames.

Chapter 2, Suburbanization. Not everyone was happy
with the huge enrollments; values, norms, and identities were at stake.
Senior physicists complained that the hordes of new recruits seemed bent on
a physics career rather than a scientific calling. Compounding the issue,
more physics students sought jobs in industry than the academy for the first
time. The teamwork skills of the "organization man" seemed pitted against
individual initiative. In questionnaires and correspondence, meanwhile,
many students blithely invoked high salaries, "fat fees" from consulting,
and the comforts of suburban living to justify their reasons to study.
Soon the message became self-reinforcing, as employers trumpeted the middle-class
"normal living" associated with their jobs in hundreds of advertisements
aimed at physics students. Amid the changes, physicists assessed themselves
and their students through the idiom of suburbanization.

Chapter 3, Information Overload. More than just
salaries were at stake. With each graduate student expected to publish
some original research, journals exploded faster than publishers could handle
the load. Interwar assumptions about academic publishing came in for
immediate reappraisal; increasingly bureaucratic instruments were needed
to handle the maze of paperwork between authors, reviewers, and editors, none
of whom could be expected to know each other any more. The numbers of
new practitioners and publications likewise challenged older ideas about the
field's intellectual coherence. Bureaucracy and specialization bred
wild ideas about how to handle scholarly communication, inspiring biting editorials
and even a murderous shooting spree. Lost amid the sea of print, many
feared, was a sense of belonging or unity, of physics as a special community.

Chapter 4, Training Quantum Mechanics. Within
the bulging classrooms, the crush of students helped to shift what would
count as teachable topics or appropriate research. Staple graduate-level
courses in departments across the country routinely drew one hundred students
at a time; advanced seminars swelled to thirty or forty students. The
pedagogical fall-out is revealed in dozens of unpublished student notes and
behind-the-scenes negotiations among textbook authors, editors, and publishers.
A kind of curricular arteriosclerosis set in, as physicists accentuated those
elements that could be routinized into problem sets and exam questions while
quietly dropping the last vestiges of "philosophy," "interpretation," or "speculation"
that had long been a principal element of physicists' education. Over
and above military patronage and industrial contracts, pedagogical pressures
re-shaped the discipline's guiding epistemology.

Chapter 5, The Bubble Bursts. The assumptions
that had driven the enrollment boom eventually broke down. As tensions
with the Soviets cooled and resources dried up, military patrons began to
question whether seemingly open-ended "basic" research -- which had funded,
directly or indirectly, nearly all graduate training in physics -- was producing
the best return on their investment. Widespread protests against the
Vietnam War and defense-related research on campuses often targeted physicists'
facilities. Changing draft regulations during the late stages of the
Vietnam War removed long-standing exemptions for physics (and other) students,
exacerbating the problem. The demand for young physicists, having outstripped
supply for nearly two decades, dried up fast: 989 physics graduates
competed for 253 advertised jobs in 1968, while 1053 sought out just 53
jobs on offer in 1971. A new generation of physics graduate students,
meanwhile, labored to distinguish themselves from the caricature of stooges
in the pocket of the Pentagon. Amid shifting national priorities and
vanishing funds, physicists' enrollments dropped fully one-third from their
peak in just five years, falling to one-half by decade's end.

Chapter 6, Physics After the Fall. Chapter 6 follows physicists' intellectual
adjustment to the new realities. During the decade after Sputnik, the number of Ph.D.-granting
physics departments doubled in the United States. Like factories optimized to produce one kind of
product, these departments suddenly faced a dramatic "overcapacity" when the student
numbers fell so precipitously. Their pedagogical compasses so immediately unmoored, groups in
many of these departments began to widen the space of "allowable" research topics. Only
after the bubble burst did a sizeable fraction of American physicists devote attention (on their
scratch pads and in their classrooms) to topics like the foundations of quantum mechanics -- which
had been ruled out so definitively during the prior era of gigantism. Other "speculative"
topics, such as black holes, the warping of spacetime, and the shape and fate of the universe, likewise
began to make inroads now that the previous metric had been toppled. New pedagogical assumptions took
root about what physics could be and what physicists should do.

Related material for
chapter 6 may be found in:
Kaiser, " When fields collide,"
Scientific American 296 (June 2007): 62-69.

Chapter 7,
A Second Bubble. Driven by the 1980s defense build-up under the Reagan Administration, combined
with new fears of economic competition from Japan, physics enrollments shot up rapidly, matching the late-1960s
peak; they fell sharply a decade later with the end of the Cold War. Once again dire predictions of
shortfalls in the scientific labor supply had been stupendously mistaken; once again physics marked the extremes
of a general pattern throughout American universities. Many of the challenges that had accompanied the first
bubble returned with a vengeance; indeed, some still face the discipline. Communication, specialization, and
trust are no easier to manage today than they were during the 1950s and 1960s, as made clear by controversies over
the centralized (and unrefereed) electronic physics preprint server, established in 1992. A string of well-publicized
frauds from the past decade likewise illustrates some of the lingering difficulties. In their studies of the
Renaissance, cultural historians have shown how frauds and forgeries can illuminate underlying assumptions and
taken-for-granted practices within a community; after all, the forger must have some idea about what counts as
"genuine" in order to craft his or her fake. So, too, can we use recent episodes like the Schön
case at Bell Labs, accusations of data-rigging in the search for superheavy elements at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, and the colorful Bogdanov brothers (who managed to publish not one but three nonsense articles in
peer-reviewed physics journals, including one edited by physicists at MIT) to study what happens to a recently
bloated field during a period of fast-declining resources.

Epilogue,
Bubbles and the Academy, will discuss how the physicists' enrollment bubbles illuminate
comparable shifts in other fields across American higher education. Disciplines as varied as
computer science, literature, history, and psychology each went through boom-and-bust cycles during
the postwar decades. None was a carbon-copy of the physicists' example; they occurred later in time
and remained smaller in magnitude. But each demonstrates how the ebb and flow of student numbers can
shape the contours of intellectual life, from challenges to the Western canon to the rise of social and cultural
history. The physicists' case likewise stands as a cautionary tale -- highlighting the promise as well as
the special challenges inherent in runaway growth -- as fields such as genomics and nanotechnology undergo their
own frantic expansion today.